Celebrating Black Music Month: “The Soul Stirrers”

All month lone we are celebrating our contribution to music..Today we shine the spotlight on The Soul Stirrers…

The Soul Stirrers are an American gospel music group, whose career spans over eighty years. The group was a pioneer in the development of the quartet style of gospel, and a major influence of soul music, doo wop, and motown sound, some of the secular music that owed much to gospel.

The group was formed by Roy Crain, who had launched his first quartet, which sang in a jubilee style, in 1926 in Trinity, Texas. In the early 1930s, after Crain moved to Houston, he joined an existing group on the condition that it change its name to “the Soul Stirrers.” The name “Soul Stirrers” yields from the description of one of Roy Crain’s earlier quartets as “soul-stirring”. Among the members of that group was R. H. Harris, who soon became its musical leader. The Soul Stirrers formed as a Jubilee quartet, transformed their sound, influenced by many hard gospel singers such as Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Rebert Harris, also from Trinity, Texas, brought several changes to the Soul Stirrers that affected gospel quartet singing generally. He used a falsetto style that had its antecedents in African music, but which was new to the popular jubilee singing style of the time. He pioneered the “swing lead”, in which two singers would share the job of leading the song, allowing virtuoso singers to increase the emotional intensity of the song as the lead passed between them without disturbing the four part harmony. That innovation led the Soul Stirrers, while still called a quartet, to acquire five members; later groups would have as many as seven but still consider themselves “quartets”, which referred more to their style than their number.